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A young man sits illuminated only by the light of a computer screen. His fingers dance across the keyboard. While it appears that he is only word processing or playing a game, he may be committing a felony. In the state of Connecticut, computer crime is defined as: 53 a- 251. Computer Crime (a) Defined. A person commits computer crime when he violates any of the provisions of this section. (b) Unauthorized access to a computer system. (1) A person is guilty of the computer crime of unauthorized access to a computer system when, knowing that he is not authorized to do so, he accesses or causes the be accessed any computer system without authorization... (c) Theft of computer services.
A person is guilty of the computer crime o f theft of computer services when he accesses or causes to be accessed or otherwise uses or causes to be used a computer system with the intent to obtain unauthorized computer services. (d) Interruption of computer services. A person is guilty of the computer crime of interruption of computer services when he, without authorization, intentionally or recklessly disrupts or degrades or causes the disruption or degradation of computer services or denies or causes the denial of computer services to an authorized user of a computer system. (e) Misuse of computer system information. A person is guilty of the computer crime of misuse of computer system information when: (1) As a result of his accessing or causing to be accessed a computer system, he intentionally makes or causes to be made an unauthorized display, use, disclosure or copy, in any form, of data residing in, communicated by or produced by a computer system. Penalties for committing computer crime range from a class B misdemeanor to a class B felony. The severity of the penalty is determined based on the monetary value of the damages inflicted. (2) The law has not always had much success stopping computer crime.
In 1990 there was a nationwide crackdown on illicit computer hackers, with arrests, criminal charges, one dramatic show-trial, several guilty pleas, and huge confiscations of data and equipment all over the USA. The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better organized, more deliberate, and more resolute than any previous efforts. The U. S. Secret Service, private telephone security, and state and local law enforcement groups across the country all joined forces in a determined attempt to break the back of America's electronic underground. It was a fascinating effort, with very mixed results.
In 1982, William Gibson coined the term 'Cyberspace'. Cyberspace is defined as 'the 'place' where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk... The place between the phones. The indefinite place out there. ' (1, p. 1) The words 'community' and 'communication's hare the same root.
Wherever one allows many people to communicate, one creates a community. "Cyberspace" is as much of a community as any neighborhood or special interest group. People will fight more to defend the communities that they have built then they would fight to protect themselves. This two-sided fight truly began when the AT& T telephone network crashed on January 15, 1990. The crash occurred due to a small bug in AT& T's own software. It began with a single switching station in Manhattan, New York, but within ten minutes the domino effect had brought down over half of AT& T's network. The rest was overloaded, trying to compensate for the overflow.
This crash represented a major corporate embarrassment. Sixty thousand people lost their telephone service completely. During the nine hours of effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted. Because of the date of the crash, Martin Luther King Day (the most politically touchy holiday), and the absence of a physical cause of the destruction, AT& T did not find it difficult to rouse suspicion that the network had not crashed by itself- that it had been crashed, intentionally. By people the media has called hackers. Hackers define themselves as people who explore technology.
If that technology takes them outside of the boundaries of the law, they will do very little about it. True hackers follow a 'hacker's ethic', and never damage systems or leave electronic 'footprints' where they have been. Crackers are hackers who use their skills to damage other people's systems or for personal gain. These people, mistakenly referred to as hackers by the media, have been sensationalized in recent years. Software pirates, or warez dealers, are people who traffic in pirated software (software that is illegally copied and distributed). These people are usually looked down on by the more technically sophisticated hackers and crackers.
Another group of law-breakers that merit mentioning are the phreaks. Telephone phreaks are people that experiment with the telephone network. Their main goal is usually to receive free telephone service, through the use of such devices as homemade telephone boxes. They are often much more extroverted than their computer equivalents.
Phreaks have been known to create world-wide conference calls that run for hours (on someone else's bill, of course). When someone has to drop out, they call up another phreaks to join in. Hackers come from a wide variety of odd subcultures, with a variety of languages, motives and values. The most sensationalized of these is the " cyberpunk" group. The cyberpunk FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) states: 2. What is cyberpunk, the subculture?
Spurred on by cyberpunk literature, in the mid- 1980 's certain groups of people started referring to themselves as cyberpunk, because they correctly noticed the seeds of the fictional 'techno-system' in Western society today, and because they identified with the marginalized characters in cyberpunk stories. Within the last few years, the mass media has caught on to this, spontaneously dubbing certain people and groups 'cyberpunk'. Specific subgroups which are identified with cyberpunk are: Hackers, Crackers, and Phreaks: 'Hackers' are the 'wizards' of the computer community; people with a deep understanding of how their computers work, and can do things with them that seem 'magical'. 'Crackers' are the real-world analogues of the 'console cowboys' of cyberpunk fiction; they break in to other people's computer systems, without their permission, for illicit gain or simply for the pleasure of exercising their skill. 'Phreaks' are those who do a similar thing with the telephone system, coming up with ways to circumvent phone companies' calling charges and doing clever things with the phone network. All three groups are using emerging computer and telecommunications technology to satisfy their individualist goals. Cypherpunks: These people think a good way to bollix 'The System' is through cryptography and crypto systems. They believe widespread use of extremely hard- to-break coding schemes will create "...
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